Sources

What this screen shows

The Sources screen (/[org]/projects/[project]/visibility/sources) is the earned-visibility view: third-party domains AI cites on your prompts — the review sites, communities and roundups earning your category’s visibility. Where Citations lists every cited URL split into yours and competitors’, Sources takes the everything-else — every cited page that belongs to neither you nor a tracked competitor — and groups it by domain. One row per site, all-time, across every prompt and platform.

This matters because a huge share of AI answers lean on exactly these pages. If ChatGPT keeps citing a G2 category listing or a Reddit thread when it answers your prompts, that page is doing the work of shaping the answer — and the fastest way to change the answer is often to change that page, not one of your own. Every source here is paired with a playbook for going to earn or defend that citation.

(Illustrative values.) Third-party sources counts the distinct outside domains cited on your prompts. Earned citations sums how many times any of them was cited. Cited in latest is how many of those sources appeared in your most recent answers — i.e. still current, not just historical. You’re absent from counts the sources where OptimizeCamp checked the cited page and confirmed your brand isn’t on it — a count of known absences, not of every site (a source that hasn’t been checked, or whose page blocked the check, doesn’t count here).

The sources table

Each row is one third-party domain, with five columns:

Source types

Each domain is tagged with a source type — how AI tends to use it — classified from a built-in map of well-known sites. The type is what decides which kind of playbook you’ll get, so it’s worth knowing the five:

Are you on the page? The presence pill

The You column answers a simple, high-value question: when AI cites this page, does it find your brand on it? OptimizeCamp fetches the most-cited page and checks for your brand name and aliases, giving one of four states:

• Present — your brand was found on the cited page. The citation is already working in your favor; the play here is usually to defend it.
• Absent — the page was fetched, looked like the real article, and your brand is not on it. This is the gap: AI is citing a page you could be on and aren’t.
• Unverified — the page blocked our last check (some sites challenge automated requests), so the stored state may be stale. Re-check from the playbook drawer, or open the page yourself.
• — — unknown. The page hasn’t been checked yet, or the fetch was blocked, timed out, or wasn’t HTML. The pill’s tooltip reads “Not checked yet — use Check presence.”

Narrowing the table

Two independent filters cut the list. The row of chips above the table — All, Suggested, In progress, Won — narrows by the state of each source’s attached play, so you can jump straight to the sources you haven’t started on, the ones a teammate is working, or the wins. The play lifecycle behind these states is covered in Earned-media playbooks.

The second one lives in the table itself: the You column heading is a dropdown, filtering by the presence pill in the column beneath it — All, Absent, Present, Unverified, Not checked, one option per badge the column can show. While a filter is on, the heading says so (“You: Absent”), so a narrowed table never looks like the whole list. Absent is the one to reach for first: it is exactly the set of pages the “You’re absent from” tile counts, so the filter and the tile can never disagree.

The two combine — “suggested playbooks on pages I’m absent from” is one view — and every option carries the count you will actually get, computed with the other filter’s selection held where it is. Changing either one returns you to page one.

How the list stays current

You never refresh this screen by hand. Sources are rolled up from your existing citation data, and the roll-up happens in the background when you open the page — so a project that predates this feature backfills on its first visit without making you wait. Two light guards keep it efficient:

• The roll-up only recomputes when tracking has produced new data and the last recompute is more than a few hours old.
• Enrichment (source type + presence) fills in a small batch of the top sources per visit, and re-checks presence when it’s more than a week stale. Source type is always set instantly; a failed fetch never erases a real verdict — presence keeps its last known value, an Absent whose latest check was blocked shows as Unverified, and a never-checked source stays —.

Before you have any sources

If no third-party domains have been cited on your prompts yet, the screen shows “No third-party sources yet” and points you back to Visibility to run a tracking cycle — sources can only appear once there are answers (and their citations) to roll up.